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You can be joyful and sad
How joy differs from happiness
Happiness is relaxation, the feeling of everything going your way, and it cannot share a moment with sadness. Joy is a big, bright, enlivening feeling that startles a person awake, and nothing about it is relaxing. C.S. Lewis described it as being stabbed with longing, and it arrives with that kind of suddenness, out of nowhere, as a surprise of temporary wholeness.
In that single moment, a person can feel that even if nothing is okay right now, it is deeply okay. Joy is activating: it makes someone want to get out of the chair and go do something, because it feels like the soul saying yes to the idea that life is good and it is good to be alive.
Joy without conditions
Because joy doesn't need a long list of things to go right, a child with a complicated life can still have an enormous capacity for it. School may not feel like a wonderful place, friends may be great one day and bad the next, and the child may worry. That child can know that life doesn't always go their way and truly believe that joy can still find them. A parent chasing happiness has to keep changing conditions, and a parent trusting joy has no conditions to change.
Why does joy involve the body's stress system?
The stress system is better described as an activation system. It raises heart rate, sharpens attention, and readies the body to move, whether the trigger is danger or delight. Endocrinologist Hans Selye separated the two in the mid-1970s with the term eustress, meaning the activation that comes with positive challenge. Excitement, awe, and fear all share much of the same physical arousal.
How can opposite emotions share a single moment?
Psychologists long assumed happiness and sadness sit at opposite ends of one scale. In a 2001 study, Jeff Larsen, A. Peter McGraw, and John Cacioppo found that students reported feeling both happy and sad at the end of their university years. Graduations, weddings, and goodbyes are common triggers for the mix. The finding is one reason many researchers now treat positive and negative feeling as separate dimensions.
Why did C.S. Lewis tie joy to longing?
In his 1955 memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis used the word for a sharp pang of desire that he said was more wanted than any ordinary satisfaction. He first felt it as a child and kept meeting it later through books and landscapes. He believed the longing pointed to something beyond anything the world could supply. The German word Sehnsucht, usually translated as yearning, names the same feeling.
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